NO FUTURE IN OLD WORLD DISCOUNT BINS

M. Robert Beynat, Big Cheese at Bordeaux's forthcoming Vinexpo



Major Frog Kicks Ocker Teeth
Numbers War Hots Up As Everything Changes

OK. It’s official. By 2012, the United Kingdom will be world’s biggest importer of wine.

While France’s wine consumption tumbles, along with its Cognac and Armagnac guzzle, the French are hitting the Scotch whisky big time, with an eight per cent increase.

Meanwhile, the Japanese, Chinese, and Russians are following the Poms to reverse the Frogs’ trend away from wine. They're into it.

So. What’s new?

This news from Reuters’ reporter Marcel Michelson is the first of a huge wave of numbers and propaganda that we can expect from the powers that be at Vinexpo, the world’s biggest regular plonkfest, held every second year in Bordeaux.

It's on this year in June. We all hope they've got the airconditioning fixed.

Robert Beynat, chief executive and co-founder of the Vinexpo has opened the squirt by prophecying that the world will continue to drink more wine in the next few years.

Champagne and other sparkling wines will increase by twelve per cent, he forecast.

This may explain why the French have recently, suddenly, made the precious appellation of Champagne quite a lot bigger, in spite of global warming simultaeneously forcing Champagne producers to begin eyeing land in the south of England, where it is now warm enough to make wines as good, perhaps better than, Champagne’s. The geology, after all, is identical. The white cliffs of Dover are made from the same precious Kimmeridgian chalks that give Champagne and Chablis its class.

With typical Gallic aplomb, M. Beynat dumped big time on Australia.

"China will enter the top 10 producer countries while Australia is dropping out," he said, citing our water issues, new heat and “export problems due to long distances”.

“Italy, which overtook France as biggest wine consumer country in 2007, and the biggest wine producer in 2008, is set to lose the former crown to the United States in 2012 when Americans will buy some 314 million cases of wines with an 11.9 percent rise between 2008 and 2012 following a 14.8 percent gain over the 2003 to 2007 period.

“Spain will see a further 6 percent decline in 2008 to 2012 to 92.2 million cases and will drop behind Russia that will have a growth of some 25 percent in the 2008 to 2012 period.

“That compares to a baffling rise of 60 percent over 2003-2007 and remains below the 36.6 percent expected growth in China in the period 2008-2012.

This follows recent news that Australia’s exports have suddenly dropped eleven per cent in gross volume, due partly to difficult exchange rates. What made things worse was the value dropped even more – eighteen per cent.

Australian Wine and Brandy Corporation senior analyst Peter Bailey confirmed that the fastest-growing market for Australian wine was China, which spent $74 million on our product in 2008, up 32 per cent from 2007, and making the nation the fifth-largest market in value terms.

Reflecting the growing wealth of Chinese drinkers, sales of bottled wine were up 27 per cent while sales of cheaper bulk wine were down 68 per cent, lifting the average price per litre sold by 58 per cent to $4.92.

But the gains in China were not enough to offset declines in the US, Australia's second-largest wine export customer, where sales were down just 5.6 per cent by volume but plummeted 26.5 per cent by value.

At the same time, the biggest producers report increasing international sales in their more expensive brackets as they inch away from their inexplicable long-term addiction to the discount bins of the UK and USA.

Adding spice to the soup is Fosters’ claims that their up-market sales have improved, while rival Constellation is dumping a huge lump of its low-end spirits manufactory, a move, some suggest, to cash up for the purchase of Fosters’ gutted wine division.

I can't help feeling that these great prophets, bean-counters and money-changers are even more hopeless than the finance gurus which failed to forsee the recent disappearance of all the money in the world.

They obviously have no real handle on issues of climate change, the new heat, the disappearance of the water, or the true issues associated with transport of a totally unneccessary, fashionable commodity which just happens to be a major recreational drug and one of the most scary depressants available.
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COMMENTS:

Wayne Young said... Let's do some math... "In 2012, the US will consume more wine than Italy".

For the sake of comparison let's use some current statistics: Approx consumption: 300 million cases per year. Italian population: 60 million. US population: 300 million. Italian consumption per capita: 5 cases per year. US consumption: 1 case per year.

When we get American consuming HALF what Italians consume, per capita, that will be news.

Shiraz viognier: gluggy dumb muck

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by PHILIP WHITE - This was published in The Independent Weekly on 26 September 2008

Something really scary is happening to shiraz.

Since vintage, I’ve tasted thousands of barrels, tanks and bottles of this great Australian staple in various stages of undress. The wines, I mean. Although I am guilty of conducting the odd early morning tasting without pants – the palate’s fresher sans culottes – the wines I’m discussing here are being prepared for market, and are still awkward, unfinished, and uncovered.

Suddenly, unbelievably, it’s really hard to get a taste of shiraz that has not been adulterated to some extent by viognier.

In the northern, cooler part of France’s Rhone Valley, the shiraz is often pale, lacks tannin, and resembles cranberry juice more than, say, a hearty Barossa or McLaren Vale job. So they add a little viognier, the white grape that was so unpopular its total world plantings were down to six footy grounds before Yalumba bravely chose to make it famous twenty seven years ago. Now viognier’s all over the joint. Not quite the weed that chardonnay became, but threatening.

Genetically, the French viognier is very close to that tannic red mystery from over the Alps, nebbiolo. Very few Australians have the pluck and nous to grow or make good nebbiolo, as its confounding raft of tannin seems somehow disconnected from its elegant cranberry/raspberry/strawberry fruit. Wisely, they avoid it.

So, since white is much more difficult to make than red, why the hell did these boofheads suddenly pretend fluency in viognier, the white nebbi?

When shiraz is on the weaker side of elegant, you can bolster it with the raft of tannin cool climate viognier supplies. You need only one or two per cent of co-fermented viognier to give the red finishing weight and extra aroma, often along the lines of apricot. Apricot and cranberry, see? Makes some sort of sense.

My scant biochemistry makes it risky for me to attempt to explain what the mealy viogner tannin does to the pale colour of such wines, but it’s safe to say it somehow changes the anthocyanins of the blend, enhancing the blues and purples of the wine. A dribble of viognier, or a night or two on viognier skins, makes pale shiraz deeper in hue.

But in Australia, where we can’t seem to pick shiraz below fifteen per cent alcohol, so it’s black, and stacked with natural shiraz tannin, and packed to the gunnels with dense-to-impenetrable blackberry, prune, dried fig, licorice, salt and whatnot, I simply cannot see why anybody would want to add apricot.

It gets worse. The really stupid add over-ripe viognier to over-ripe shiraz. Once it’s above, say 13.5% alcohol, viognier ceases to smell and taste of the almost-elegant apricot, and suddenly becomes the thick dull syrup you get in a tin of peaches. It loses its drying, savoury tannin. It’s gluggy dumb muck. The shiraz needs water and acid, not alcoholic syrup.

Now they’ve planted so much sicko viognier in the wrong places and finally realise they’ve fluffed it, they’re all tipping it in their shiraz, and hoping nobody notices. They think they’re hiding it.

Which leads me to fiano, the white from Italy’s Campagnia, where they make awful oxidised plonk and plug it with a piece of Portuguese bark. But at Coriole, in McLaren Vale, the new plantings produce an ethereal, vaporous wisp of a drink that seems to float off the palate like a cloud, leaving a neat little coating of powdery, mealy tannin on the tongue. This excites the appetite and turns on the epicurean quarter of the sensory tent. Try Coriole’s 2008 vintage, and you’ll immediately get my drift.

Mark Lloyd agrees with much of the above, sufficiently to show the whole damn lot of us that there are gastronomically intelligent alternatives. So when he pointed his Coriole team at its first serious fiano in 2006, they took the wine off its skins much earlier than the Italians do, in order to achieve that lighter, ethereal style. But the skins had enough of the right phenolic tannins and aromatics to set Mark thinking about how that would influence shiraz.

So the Coriole Shiraz Fiano 2006 has about three per cent of the latter in it, co-fermented, to stunning advantage. The fiano somehow brightens the lighter red fruit spectrum of the shiraz, enhancing the raspberry and strawberry aspects which are usually hidden in all that blackberry and prune. So you have this lovely intense shiraz prettied up and lightened with vivacious raspberry, musk and marshmallow sugar. It’s as cute as all get out. And then the mealy, powdery tannins of the fiano somehow render the wine’s finish a lot more entertaining and savoury than normal shiraz.

Not to mention all this highly abnormal, deformed shiraz that reeks of viognier, and which will be sold without any label even vaguely mentioning the v-word or its inclusion. These mugs are buggering the flavour of Australia's most significant red, hoping nobody will notice. Very, very stupid.

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